Meet Zynga Boston's new leader

Fareed Mosavat moved to Cambridge, Mass. from San Francisco to join video game startup Conduit Labs, a little over three years ago. When Zynga Inc. (Nasdaq: ZNGA) acquired Conduit, Mosavat stayed on - like most of the original team.

When he left Zynga last week for a venture partner position with Boston VC firm Spark Capital, Conduit founder Nabeel Hyatt passed the baton to Mosavat, who is now head of studio at Zynga Boston – the Cambridge outpost of the video game industry’s newest giant. Since acquiring Conduit in 2011, Zynga has roughly quadrupled the size of its readymade Boston development team, which now employs a little over 40 people, having poached talent from Harmonix, Turbine and Boston-area tech companies, and plans to continue growing.

Mosavat grew up on the East Coast, and went to Brown University. He started his video game career about 10 years ago, as a technical director and engineer at Pixar Animation Studios in the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked there 6.5 years before deciding to try his hand at video game startups, and deciding that Boston would be the best place to do it.

Q: You wanted to do a startup, and you were in San Francisco. Why move to Boston?

There are a couple of things that made Boston work for me. I'd just had a child and I knew that I wouldn't be able to work startup hours and do the startup thing without a community and family support that I needed. We had some family here, number one. Number two, … (came) when I met Nabeel and I met Dan Ogles, Dan O’Brien, Jesse Kurlancheek, and other people part of the Conduit Labs team when I first joined. I knew my success and what I learned was going to be based more on the people I worked with and less on the geography.

Q: Describe your initial role at Conduit

I started as an engineer, but became more and more involved with product over the course of time. I am the kind of engineer who cares what I’m building as much as how to build it. I was the one who built all our analytics and dashboards and started becoming the guy looking at them every day and reporting on them and making product decisions on it. I realized that my role had mostly shifted to product and changed titles to be director of product at Conduit Labs.

Q: How does analytics actually work, when applied to a creative process like a video game?

We have a lot of great game designers here, and all good games start with your gut and your intuition about what you think the market is interested in and what you think your players are interested in. … We make a hypothesis: We say, ‘Hey players want to do X, and if they did we would see this in the numbers.’ So we go and check. … We belive that what players actually do is the best indicator of quality.

Q: Sounds like an iterative approach. Do you subscribe to lean startup ideas, and use minimum viable products (MVPs)?

I believe in lean, but I believe MVPs, the scope of them grows as the market matures. In social gaming we have some pretty strong games out there in the market from us and our competitors. Adventure World (a recent Zynga release pitched and developed by Zynga Boston) was pretty fully baked when we had it out there and it took us quite a while to build that game. Over time as markets mature minimum viable products grow in scope. We still talk in those terms, but each game sets a new bar for what players expect. We try to build on best practices of what we've learned, but have each game innovate in some way.

Q: Can you give an example of a time you tried something that didn’t work?

We believed that (Adventure World) players would be really interested in every map being really different, and consistently changing with lots of different choices. One thing we've done is trying to find the right pace of experimentation, and it's a little bit slower than we'd anticipated. Consistency is more important than we had expected with our players. As game designers, you get excited about tyring new things a lot. One of the things that's exciting about being a data-driven company is you can figure out when the right times are to innovate, and when the right times are to reinforce.

Q: What’s next for Zynga Boston?

We are starting some thinking about what's coming next … in technology – like the BRO (Boston Rendering Optimization) Engine. That was built here for our game. We want to be a technical leader inside of the company.